Critical Asian Studies RICE FARMING IN BALI of...MacRae / Rice Farming in Bali RICE FARMING IN BALI Organic Production and Marketing Challenges Graeme MacRae ABSTRACT:AllisnotwellwithagricultureinSoutheastAsia.Theproductivitygainsof

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MacRae / Rice Farming in Bali

RICE FARMING IN BALI

Organic Productionand Marketing Challenges

Graeme MacRae

ABSTRACT: All is not well with agriculture in Southeast Asia. The productivity gains ofthe Green Revolution have slowed and even reversed and environmental problemsand shortages of water and land are evident. At the same time changing world mar-kets are shifting the dynamics of national agricultural economies. But from thepoint of view of farmers themselves, it is their season-to-season economic survivalthat is at stake. Bali is in some ways typical of other agricultural areas in the region,but it is also a special case because of its distinctive economic and cultural environ-ment dominated by tourism. In this environment, farmers are doubly marginalized.At the same time the island offers them unique market opportunities for premiumand organic produce. This article examines the ways in which these opportunitieshave been approached and describes their varying degrees of success. It focuses es-pecially on one project that has been successful in reducing production costs byconversion to organic production, but less so in marketing its produce. It argues fi-nally for the need for integrated studies of the entire rice production/marketingcomplex, especially from the bottom-up point of view of farmers.

The agriculture sector in Indonesia, and indeed most of Southeast Asia, hassince about 1990 been in a state often described in terms such as “decline,”“marginalization,” and even “crisis.” The most obvious manifestations of thisare the steady shrinking of the agricultural component of national economic in-dicators and progressive transfers of land, labor, and capital from agriculture toother sectors. The causes are multiple, complex, and well-documented; they in-clude declining productivity, increasing input costs, and static produce prices,as well as environmental factors such as water shortages and soil degradation.1

Critical Asian Studies43:1 (2011), 69–92

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The Indonesian island of Bali is broadly typical of this pattern, but is in cer-tain respects a special case because of its relative affluence and the dominantrole of tourism in its economy. Farmers are on one hand doubly marginalized bythe growing prosperity around them and by the alternative income opportuni-ties in the tourism sector. On the other hand, tourism and the associatedexpatriate community and export sector offer significant potential markets forpremium, “heritage,” and organic produce. The agriculture sector in Bali hasfor some years been poised at a crossroads between two broad paths for futuredevelopment: one of integration into global agro-industry and agribusiness, theother, a still fragmented movement of small, local initiatives based on principlesof local self-sufficiency and sustainability, involving various combinations of re-vival of traditional varieties, organic production, and more modern/globalapproaches to marketing.2 The pros and cons of these approaches have beenwidely debated globally, but in Bali the distinctive local economic and culturalconditions lend an added logic to the latter approach.

The horticulture (sub-)sector, especially in the mountain areas, has provenrelatively adept at exploiting opportunities for new products and markets. Thisis consistent with a long-established pattern across Indonesia of flexibility, com-

70 Critical Asian Studies 43:1 (2011)

1. See, for example, Pingali, Hossain, and Gerpacio 1997; and Gerard and Ruf 2001.2. MacRae 2005 (Growing).

“Few young people in Bali, at least in the more affluent and touristed areas, choose to be-come farmers. So unattractive has farming become that farmers routinely advise their chil-dren against following in their footsteps.” (Credit: Mudassir)


mercial orientation, and innovation among upland horticulturalists.3 The ricesector however has been much less inclined to change, let alone shown an inter-est in innovation or entrepreneurialism. This too is consistent with an Indo-nesia-wide pattern, rooted partly in material factors such as the collective decision--making and cropping schedules imposed by irrigation systems. The resistanceto change has also been linked with what is said to be an inherent peasant con-servatism, which in itself explains little. In Indonesia rice farmers, includingBalinese ones, are mostly over fifty years of age and have spent most of theirworking lives under the top-down command regime of Suharto’s New Order.They remember the time, prior to the Green Revolution of the New Order,when hunger and even starvation were real consequences of regular low pro-ductivity and occasional crop failure. Neither their age nor their experienceinclines them to experimentation, innovation, or risk. Consequently, when I be-gan researching this subject in 2003, new and alternative approaches had madevery little headway. Since then, however, unprecedented and unexpected devel-opments have taken place in the organic production of rice and, to a lesserextent, in innovative approaches to the marketing of such produce. These de-velopments are the subject of this essay.

The Rice Farmer’s Lament

Few young people in Bali, at least in the more affluent and touristed areas,choose to become farmers. So unattractive has farming become that farmersroutinely advise their children against following in their footsteps. As a resultthe farming population is aging and this raises serious questions about genera-tional succession. The reasons for this flight from the fields are many, but for themajority of farmers, farming is first and foremost a matter of livelihood. The fun-damental problem lies at this level. Income from farming reflects a simpleequation between production costs and income from sales of produce. In re-cent decades, the costs of production (primarily seed, fertilizer, and pesticides)have risen steadily, but the market price of rice has remained at best static.

This unfavorable equation is exacerbated by several factors. First, the basicnecessities of life in a modernizing and affluent society have become less basicand more necessary; they now include items such as school fees, medical ex-penses, water and power bills, and goods such as motor vehicles and mobilephones. Second, especially in the more affluent areas, the general cost of eventhe most basic necessities has risen considerably. Third, old traditions of collec-tive labor that once helped offset labor costs have been largely abandoned infavor of wage labor and contracting. All these expenses require cash, whereasmany farmers grow only enough rice for family subsistence and need alternativesources of cash income. At the same time, alternative uses of land, such as sale orlease for residential or commercial building, have become both available andmore lucrative than farming, as have nonfarm sources of wage labor and smallbusinesses.

MacRae / Rice Farming in Bali 71

3. Hefner 2009, 337.


The declining economics of farming in Bali is the result of a complex interac-tion of factors, many of them common to Indonesia as a whole. The priorities ofgovernment agricultural policy since the 1960s have been national self-suf-ficiency first and, second, affordability of basic commodities, especially forthe urban middle and poorer classes. The well-being of farmers and thesustainability of rural economies has not been entirely ignored but has tendedto take third place to these other priorities.4 The Green Revolution package ofnew higher-yielding seed varieties, driven by petrochemical fertilizers and pesti-cides and made affordable for farmers by subsidies and easy credit financed bygrowing oil revenues, was generally successful in raising production. Nationalself-sufficiency was achieved, albeit briefly, in the mid 1980s. As a result riceprices stabilized at affordable levels for consumers, and the combination of in-creased production and subsidies resulted in comfortable incomes for farmersthrough the 1980s.5

Around 1990, this happy balance began to tip. The productivity gains of theGreen Revolution slowed, halted, and in some cases reversed. The slump in oilprices in the late 1980s severely affected Indonesia’s balance of payments andthe government began reducing subsidies to farmers. Along with rising costs forfuel and general inflation, this meant increasing production costs. At the sametime, the government agency managing the costs of basic commodities (Bulog)held the market price of rice down in favor of consumers.6 By 1993, when I be-gan my research in Bali, the economics of farming was already in serious declinein relation to the booming tourist economy.

Few farmers know or care much about this political-economic history; theysee the problem in the simple economic terms outlined above. Nevertheless,the most concise and systematic version of the bottom-up view from the ricefields that I have heard was from an extraordinary farmer, Pak Sunari, in a villagenear Payangan in central-south Bali during the lull between harvest and plant-ing times in mid 2009. Born in 1960 he remembers what older farmers told himabout earlier times, but most of what he told me is based on his personal experi-ences and observations since the late 1970s.7

Prior to 1950 farmers grew local traditional rice followed by a rotation crop(palawija), usually soya beans, in the dry season. They used only natural fertil-izers—green material and cattle and chicken manure—and pesticides madefrom ash and plants. Around 1950, they began replacing the rotation crop with a


4. Piggot et al.1993, 82, 89.5. Ibid., 86.6. The reasons for this decline in productivity are in fact considerably more complex then this

simplified sketch would suggest, but it is a sufficient generalization for our purposes here. Fora more detailed analysis, see Dawe 2002; Fane and Warr 2008; Simatupang and Timmer 2008;Piggot et al. 1993; Damarjati et al. 1989. For accounts of the Green Revolution on the neighbor-ing islands of Lombok and Java, see Cederroth and Gerdin 1986; and Cederroth 1995. On Bali,see Lansing 1991; and Poffenberger and Zurbachen 1980.

7. Sunari is a pseudonym and this account is an edited summary from my field notes based ontwo hearings of the story in May–June 2009. Pak Sunari also works in the local office of the De-partment of Agriculture and this may to some extent account for his uncommon ability toanalyze his hands-on experience.


second crop of rice.8 In 1968, the synthetic nitrogenous fertilizers, ammoniumsulphate, and urea were introduced by the government. Farmers resisted thechange, hiding the fertilizer or throwing it into their backyards or dry fieldswhere there were only banana trees. But the banana trees thrived as never be-fore so they started using it on their rice and it thrived too, and thus began a newera. In 1972, the government introduced new seed varieties with names such asIR5 and IR89 and also new pesticides—first Endrin, then Diasinon, Basasinon,and Sevin.10 They sprayed these every two weeks and the diverse creatures of therice fields—small eels, fish, frogs, snails, and insects—immediately disappearedand the soil hardened. Despite these side effects, farmers kept using the newsystem because the harvests were good and work was easier than before. But af-ter a few harvests they found they had to increase the quantities of fertilizer tomaintain production levels; this did not matter a great deal because fertilizerswere cheap. In 1978 they were hit by the brown plant hopper (wereng coklat,Nilaparvata lugens). New, more resistant varieties of seeds were introduced—IR26 and IR36, among others—but the diseases kept erupting. Eventually farm-ers stopped using the pesticides and the pest problems decreased.11

In 1980 they started planting three crops per year, each with 50kg/ha (kilogramsper hectare) of urea, but they found that each crop produced successively lessand all they achieved was to maintain production levels but with 50 percentmore work! So, in 1985, they reverted to two crops per year. By this time theirurea usage had increased to 100kg/ha without any corresponding increase inproduction. This system continued until 2002, at a constant level of productionbut with a gradual increase of urea usage to 300kg/ha.

This story brings us to the point at which I became interested in the problemsof rice farmers, and the economic logic of organic production. A number of peo-ple in Bali, most of them foreign expatriates, were thinking along similar lines:organic production seemed to have the potential to reduce input costs (fertil-izer and pesticides) while producing a product with higher value in an existingmarket for premium and chemical-free produce. To this logic was added the cel-ebrated stereotype of Balinese being great copiers of ideas that work.12 Severalof them developed themselves, or paid local farmers to develop, small organictrial plots, in the hope that their neighbors would become interested and if thecrops succeeded, they would follow suit next season. In some cases the cropsdid succeed, but the farmers did not follow suit.


8. He did not mention the reason for this change, but it may have had to do with a combination ofincreased demand and improved irrigation, both within a wider context of a national drive to-ward economic self-sufficiency.

9. The IR prefix is a standard terminology of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) inthe Philippines, which with financial support from government, academic, and internationalorganizations has led global rice research and development since the 1960s.

10. These pesticides are synthetic organic (i.e., carbon-based) chloride phosphate and carbamatecompounds that multinational chemical companies developed in the 1950s. They were widelyused through the 1970s, but are now banned in many countries because of their dangeroustoxicity to non-target species, including humans.

11. This correlation between pesticide use and frequency of pests is consistent with reports fromelsewhere in Indonesia. See Winarto 1999, 166.

12. Covarrubias 1994, 403.


The expatriate exemplars were mystified and so was I. In 2005 I became in-volved in another initiative to assist a group of farmers in western Bali make thetransition to organic production.13 Their story was typical: until about 1990 theyhad been able to live well by growing rice, but since 1990 production costs andthe cost of living have risen steadily, while prices for their crops had not. In addi-tion their soil seemed to be suffering the effects of long-term chemical fertilizeruse and their supply of irrigation water was becoming less reliable.14

Despite these problems, these farmers were well positioned to move to or-ganic production. They were skilled, experienced, and dedicated full time torice production. Some of them were still growing traditional local varieties thatlend themselves to organic methods. They also had a strong functioning com-munity and although many of their young people had moved away to work, thelocal economy was still essentially agriculture based. They could see their prob-lems clearly but solutions less so. Some of them had already begunexperimenting with alternative crops, such as cocoa, bananas, and vanilla,which did not require irrigation and could fetch better prices, but because oftheir distance from major markets and their lack of experience in marketing,they did not always realize the potential of this experiment.


13. The group included a Balinese agricultural scientist Dr. Alit Arthawiguna and some of his col-leagues, Australian researchers Rachael and Stefan Lorenzen, an Israeli expatriate Oded Karmiand his Balinese partners Ni Nila and I Jabu, who produce and market organic vegetables andrice for sale through networks of local expatriate consumers.

14. This project is discussed in more detail in MacRae 2005 (Anthropologist).

Until about 1990, rice farmers in western Bali “had been able to live well by growing rice,but since 1990 production costs and the cost of living have risen steadily, while prices fortheir crops had not becoming less reliable.” (Credit: author)


Our group discussed their situation, made suggestions based on our experi-ence, and agreed to assist and support them if they decided to change to organicproduction. The farmers expressed enthusiasm in principle but nothing hap-pened. The reasons for this reluctance to take what appeared to us to be anobvious path are not entirely clear, but they include the factors discussed above,together with an oft-cited (but not always true) need for agreement of the entiresubak15 before any significant changes to cropping patterns, irrigation cycles, oreven seed varieties could be made. In many other cases, broader structural fac-tors also inhibit change, including these:

• In touristed and urban areas many farmers farm only part time, oftenjust for enough rice to feed their families; they work the rest of the time inother sectors to earn much-needed cash. As a result they are disinclined toinvest in any changes, especially if these appear to involve an extra com-mitment of time or energy. Likewise medium- or long-term developmentof agricultural systems is simply not their priority.• Many farmers all over Bali are sharecroppers rather than owners, keep-ing only half or less of the harvest for themselves. They often have noresponsibility for the entire management of soil, seed, fertilizer, and pesti-cides, let alone do they have long-term security on the land they work.This too is a disincentive to investment in longer-term investment.• Landholdings tend to be small (less than half a hectare), especially inthe urbanized areas, meaning they are often sufficient only to supplyhousehold consumption but not sales outside. This is another disincen-tive to investment or commercial ambitions.

This contradictory picture of economic unsustainability and awareness of aneed for change combined with reluctance to change has been a repeatedtheme in my experience of rice farmers in south Bali.16 Since 2005, however,promising developments have been seen, as this article will show. These devel-opments illustrate how both the production and the marketing aspects of riceproduction in Bali have been systematically addressed.

Recent Initiatives

Government subsidies for seed, fertilizer, and pesticides were progressively re-duced from the late 1980s and had all but ended by the end of the 1990s.17 Bythis time, the authoritarian New Order regime had also ended, leaving the coun-try in economic and political turmoil, but also creating room for new freedomsof choice and action, including for farmers. But, as mentioned above, mostfarmers were at least fifty years old by that point and had spent their entire work-


15. Subak is a traditional local organization concerned primarily with irrigation and the ritual as-pects of rice production.

16. Many researchers have warned about the dangers of generalizations in Bali, but in this matterthe pattern is almost universal, at least in my experience, which is largely in the southern half ofthe island. My generalizations also refer specifically to farmers of irrigated rice. Dry-field farm-ers, especially market gardeners in the mountains, have long shown themselves to beconsiderably more flexible and innovative. See MacRae 2005 (Growing).

17. Suparmoko 2002, 6.


ing lives under a regime of top-down commands and had little experience ofmaking their own decisions. At the same time, the local knowledge that their fa-thers once had was now largely lost.18 It was in this mixed climate of lostknowledge and new opportunity that a few experiments began.

In Ubud, a tourism center that is also home to a large expatriate community,several shops and restaurants provide organic food and a number of experi-ments with organic production have begun. A local nongovernmentalorganization, Indonesian Development of Education and Permaculture(IDEP),19 has also been teaching permaculture and SRI (System of Rice Intensifi-cation) cultivation methods around Ubud. One former IDEP employee hasformed his own organization, teaching these methods in a widening circle.20

Through these initiatives, at least one government agricultural extension officerhas also become involved in propagating SRI. As a result dozens of farmers havenow adopted SRI with varying degrees of commitment and success and aremoving simultaneously toward more organic methods.

The Indonesian government has also begun to embrace organic production,at least in theory. The Department of Agriculture has begun researching andconducting field trials of organic methods and in 2009 the governor of Bali an-nounced funding of Rp 8 billion to “raise awareness” of organic methods.21

In 2003, Pak Sunari (referred to above) and a group of farmers decided to trysomething new in response to the increasingly obvious imbalance between in-puts and outputs in rice production. About thirty farmers bought “organic”fertilizer,22 made from cattle and chicken manure, from a commercial supplier23

in East Java and tried it, at a rate of fifteen tons/ha on twelve hectares of theirland. The experiment did not work well, but they tried again the next season,this time combining the fertilizer with fifty kilograms of urea per hectare. Pro-duction increased from 6.8 tons/ha to 7.2 tons/ha.24

In 2004 these same farmers began making their own compost from cow ma-nure and applying it at a rate of eight tons/ha; in addition they reduced theirapplication of urea (to forty kg/ha). Production rose again to 7.5 tons/ha. By2009, they had reduced their compost to five tons/ha and urea to fifteen kg/ha;since then they have maintained yields of 7.5 tons/ha.


18. For an example, in relation to pest management, see Winarto 1999, 174–75.19. Available online at www.idepfoundation.org/ (accessed 21 April 2010). Permaculture is a ge-

neric term, but also a brand name, for a systematization of traditional techniques andphilosophies of sustainable agriculture and human settlements, see www.permaculture.org/nm/index.php/site/index/ (accessed 11 May 2010). SRI (System of Rice Intensification) is like-wise a brand name for a set of techniques for improving yields of modern rice varieties. Seeciifad.cornell.edu/sri/ (accessed 13 June 2010). SRI leans toward, but is not totally dependenton organic practices.

20. See www.trihitakaranabali.com (accessed 9 December 2009).21. See, for example, Dinas Pertanian 2004; and Erviani 2009.22. The farmers later found out that their supposedly organic fertilizer contained large amount of

nonorganic rubbish such as fragments of plastic packaging.23. P.T. Sang Hyang Seri (named for the goddess who dwells in the rice plant) is a large (Java-wide)

commercial supplier of seed and fertilizers. See www.shs-seed.com/index.php (accessed 13June 2010).

24. All crop yields are expressed in metric tons and refer, unless otherwise noted, to gabah keringpanen, i.e., the crop harvested, threshed, and dried, but not yet milled.


Table of fertilizer usage and yields

Year Urea(kg/ha)

Compost(ton/ha)

Yield(ton/ha)

2002 300 00 6.8

2003 50 15 7.2

2004 40 8 7.5

2009 15 5 7.5

The farmers also stopped using petrochemical pesticides. The beneficialcreatures that had disappeared from their fields gradually returned. Since thenthe farmers no longer have had any significant disease problems.25 Even the ro-dent plagues that were decimating crops all over Bali in mid 2009 were nolonger a significant problem because of the return of natural predators andtheir location adjacent to a significant area of natural forest in which the preda-tors live.26

This case, rare as it is, demonstrates that organic methods are not only feasi-ble, but that they can increase productivity at the same time as reducing inputs.The next case, discussed in more detail, provides similar evidence on a largerscale, but also addresses what for most farmers is the most intimidating prob-lem of all—marketing their crops.

Wangaya Betan27

Around the same time as Pak Sunari and his colleagues began their experiment,a local agricultural scientist, W. Alit Arthawiguna, employed by the governmentagricultural research institute BPTB, was searching for opportunities to developmore sustainable approaches to farming.28 In 2005 a group of farmers in SubakWangaya Betan (SWB) in western Bali approached Arthawiguna for help in deal-ing with their growing waste problem due to rice milling, chicken raising, andcocoa and coffee production. Arthawiguna saw these “wastes” as raw materialsfor compost and in mid 2005, he initiated a project with the SWB farmers.29


25. This was probably influenced by Integrated Pest Management (IPM) propagated by the govern-ment through the 1990s, largely in response to ongoing failures and emerging environmentand health consequences of indiscriminate petrochemical pesticide use. See Winarto 1999,163.

26. The main predators of rodents are snakes, owls, and cats, both domestic and wild, all of whichare plentiful in residual forest areas.

27. My knowledge of this project comes largely from multiple annual visits, in May–June orJuly–August, and usually accompanying Alit Arthawiguna on working visits. While these haveoften involved lengthy meetings at Wangaya Betan, the visits have also offered opportunitiesfor lengthy conversations en route. I am grateful to Alit, Nengah, and many the other people in-volved, both named and unnamed. For a more complete, but differently angled discussion ofthis project, see Arthawiguna and MacRae 2010.

28. BPTB (Balai Pengkajian Teknologi Pertanian) is a national government agricultural research in-stitute with a local branch in Denpasar. The technical details of this research and its outcomesare documented in Arthawiguna 2007.

29. Subak Wangaya Betan is in a village of the same name, at the upper end of the Yeh Ho water-shed in Tabanan district of western-south Bali. The project is reasonably well known in Bali


In June 2005, a group led by Arthawiguna met with interested farmers at thepremises of Nengah Arisa, a farmer who also owns chicken and rice-milling en-terprises.30 Arthawiguna outlined the benefits of organic production and hisideas for the project. As a result of this and subsequent meetings, a group of fourfarmers, with a total land area of two hectares, began to change their productionmethods. The key technical innovation was the production and use of com-posted cattle manure as fertilizer.

The farmers used a proprietary microbial product to assist in breaking downorganic materials, including rice stalks (jeramih), chicken manure, rice millwaste (sekam), and cocoa and coffee wastes into a form digestible by cattle.31

The resulting manure was composted to produce fertilizer. Cattle manure,which neighboring farmers were glad to be rid of, was collected to increase pro-duction. Farmers began substituting this compost for (their already low ratesof) petrochemical fertilizer.32 Their first crops were successful and productivity


and beyond and has already been the subject of publication (e.g., MacRae and Arthawiguna2010), so it and key people involved are identified by name.

30. I was a member of this group along with Australian researcher Rachel Lorenzen.31. Starbio is one of a number of propriety products increasingly used in Indonesian agriculture.

For activating compost and rendering coarse vegetable materials more digestible for livestock,see MacRae 2005 (Growing). They are based on ferments of sugar products and work as start-ers for fermentation of larger bodies of organic material. See www.lembahhijau.com/ product.htm (accessed 13 June 2010).

32. Farmers throughout Indonesia often use less than the recommended amounts of fertilizer, pri-marily as a cost-saving measure, a practice that began with the reduction of government

Compost shed in the fields. “In 2005 a group of farmers in Subak Wangaya Betan (SWB)in western Bali approached Arthawiguna for help in dealing with their growing wasteproblem due to rice milling, chicken raising, and cocoa and coffee production. Artha-wiguna saw these ‘wastes’ as raw materials for compost and in mid 2005, he initiated aproject with the SWB farmers. (Credit: Alit Arthawiguna)


increased slightly. Other farmers began following their example. A year later, inmid 2006, the group had grown to thirty and another twenty were planning tojoin. After two crops, productivity had increased from around four to fivetons/ha to five to eight tons/ha.

Cattle manure soon became scarce and farmers realized that they neededtheir own cattle. Some farmers had also bought their own cattle or obtainedthem on a calf-sharing basis through a government-sponsored program.33 Theyhad by this time also formed an organization, Kelompok Somya Pertiwi (KSP),for sharing technical expertise and collective marketing of their produce. AsKSP developed a more systematic collective compost production system and ascattle numbers and compost production increased, they were also able to sellcompost.

The method spread quickly to neighboring communities and soon there wasinterest from all over Bali and beyond. In 2006, the KSP obtained a grant fromthe Department of Agriculture to develop an on-site training center (PusatPelatihan Pertanian Pedesaan Swadaya [P4S]), complete with computer, library,facilities for teaching workshops, new cattle stalls, and a biogas (methane) sys-tem for cooking. At this stage, despite the success and rapid growth of theproject, it still involved only a minority of the subak membership of around onehundred.

Another year on (mid 2007) productivity had increased by a minimum of 4percent up to a maximum of nearly 14 percent.34 The number of cattle had in-creased to three hundred, some of which were kept in a central stall combinedwith a shed for processing and packaging compost. Most farmers kept their cat-tle in small stalls adjacent to their fields where the compost would be used.

Like Pak Sunari’s group, the KSP farmers began to notice a return ofbiodiversity to their fields. The shift from purchase of capital-intensive fertilizerto labor-intensive compost, as well as the processing and packing of compostfor sale, had also begun to provide new employment opportunities for localpeople. Thirty farmers were well established in organic production and most ofthe remaining seventy had begun converting. The P4S was built and functioningas planned. There was talk of making organic production a formal requirementunder the rules (awig-awig) of the subak.


subsidies in 1987 and increased with their total withdrawal in 1998 (Arifin 2005, 8). In areassuch as Wangaya Betan, where traditional rice varieties are still grown, the need for artificialfertilizers is less in the first place. Of the group of thirty individuals Arthawiguna surveyed in2006, the average use of urea was 177.79 kg/ha, of KCl was 8.11 kg/ha, and of Sp36, 1.25 kg/ha,all well below government recommendations. In addition several farmers were already usingsignificant amounts of organic fertilizer.

33. Such schemes are based on traditional methods of livestock resource sharing, known in atleast some parts of Bali as ngadai karang, in which the person caring for a cow has first right toits offspring.

34. Arthawiguna 2006, 2. My knowledge of this project has come mostly though annual (mid-year)visits of a few weeks, hence the “one-year-on” format of this account.


Reasons for Success

Given the track record of organic initiatives in the rice sector, the significance ofwhat had been achieved in Wangaya Betan at this stage is difficult to overstate.35

The reasons for this success are multiple, ranging from obvious technical onesto less-obvious ones embedded in social and even personal processes. Most ob-vious are the primary ecological conditions: location at the head of a watershedthat provides a pentiful supply of unpolluted water and abundant raw materialfor composting (despite not especially good soil conditions).36 The existing sys-tem of production, using traditional varieties, low levels of synthetic fertilizer,and retaining some cattle in the rice field ecology provided another layer of fa-vorable resources. Additionally, as Arthawiguna notes, the farmers are full-time,committed, and unafraid of hard work. These qualities are not uncommon inBali, including in some locations where other attempts to initiate change havefailed, so these are at best enabling rather than determining factors.

The critical factors in this case appear to be embedded in social relations,even in the personal qualities of key individuals. Every step in the process wasdiscussed and decided upon by consensus in meetings open to the entire subakand often attended by interested outsiders, including foreign researchers.Nengah organized the gatherings at his rice mill, chicken and cattle complex.Arthawiguna led the meetings. In other words, while the process was a collec-tive, democratic effort, two figures—Nengah and Arthawiguna—were the keyinitiating, motivating, and organizing forces. Nengah is a successful entrepre-neur/farmer and probably the wealthiest man in the village. He is also a personof intelligence and integrity who has chosen to use his position and resourcesfor the benefit of the whole community. He appears to have the trust and re-spect of other farmers. Arthawiguna, for his part, is an outsider, but a Balineseone, with specialist technical knowledge as well as access to resources beyondthe community. Arthawiguna draws a civil servant’s salary, but his work goes be-yond his civil duties and, most importantly, KSP members regard him more as atrusted friend than a state representative. The project may thus be seen as aloose network of individuals with shared experience and interests, motivatedand facilitated by the two key figures: Nengah within the farmers group andArthawiguna outside it.

Both Nengah and Arthawiguna are critical to the project in complementaryways. Nengah is the insider with status, without whom Arthawiguna would haveonly limited access to and credibility with the farmers. Arthawiguna on the otherhand has access to vital knowledge and resources from outside. He and Nengahhave known each other for some time and have a relationship of mutual under-standing, trust, and indeed friendship in the sense of having the interests ofeach other and the farmers and community at heart. It is the personal qualities


35. One exception is obviously Pak Sunari’s project near Payangan. The only other one of which Iam aware is just one valley away in Wangaya Gede, where a local (Gede Hanjaya) married to anexpatriate has converted his own fields to organic production, largely to supply an interna-tional yoga center located on his property. See MacRae 2005 (Growing).

36. Arthawiguna 2006, 6.


of these two men, the relationship between them, and the resultant web of trustthat lie at the heart of the project and that make it work. After several years ofworking together successfully, the trust the farmers have in Nengah has ex-tended to Arthawiguna, so he too has a direct store of credibility in their eyes.

There is a third leg to this tripod, which was less visible to me at the start be-cause I came to the project via Arthawiguna and Nengah. Pak Nyoman is one offour farmers who initially embraced organic production and has remained theone most committed to the project. Nengah and Arthawiguna refer to him con-stantly for evidence from the rice fields or affirmation of their thoughts. By 2009Nyoman had converted fully to organic production while most others were stillsupplementing their compost with small amounts of urea. His productivity is atthe top end of the scale at around eight tons/ha. Consequently, my initial dualmodel of key insider and outsider, now seems better understood as a trianglewith Arthawiguna bringing outside expertise, Nyoman the inside expert, andNengah as the link between these fields of knowledge.

Beyond these key factors are less obvious ones: those factors that have notprevented the project from working. First, the scale of the project is not too big:it started very small, grew incrementally in response to individual decisions,and even now is located primarily within a circumscribed local ecosystem andcommunity. This grounding in local landscape and face-to-face community in-teractions provides intelligibility and a sense of ownership that would be lesseasy to achieve in larger-scale projects. Second, the project is not mediated by acomplex system of intermediary outsiders let alone an anonymous bureau-cracy: it is simply the farmers linked to the outside world of knowledge andresources by the visible, known, and trusted persons of Nengah and Arthawi-guna.

This article is not the place to explore these factors in detail, but the smallscale and the absence of intermediate bureaucracy are the corollary of theface-to-face relationships that make this project work.

What Was Achieved?

While Arthawiguna’s vision of this project is driven partly by environmentalconcerns, the primary day-to-day concern of the farmers themselves is balanc-ing or preferably reversing the unequal equation between production costs anda profitable return for their harvest. Prior to 2007 the project focused largely onthe production side of this equation, and the farmers were able to lower pro-duction costs by substituting inputs of local labor (in the form of compostproduction) for cash ones (commercial fertilizer). The project had not yet ad-dressed the other side of the equation, however: marketing their produce for abetter return. Addressing this side of the equation meant that farmers had toconfront the forbidding mysteries of the market—a system that has long beendominated by traders and middlemen who have tended to take advantage offarmers’ lack of market knowledge and their need for ready cash and oftencredit as well.

In particular, farmers had not explored, let alone realized, the potential forexploiting the unique Balinese market for boutique and organic produce. They



sold some of their rice to this market at premium prices, via KSP, to the Bali Or-ganic Association (BOA) and to an expatriate restaurateur in Ubud, but themajor portion of their harvest was still sold on the local market at a small marginabove the price for ordinary rice. Consequently while the economic situation ofKSP farmers had improved, they were still far from prosperous and there wasstill room for improvement. This, and other unrealized potentials, became thefocus of the next stage of the project.

Addressing the Marketing Challenge

In July 2007, a new player with a new agenda entered the project. At a meetingin the P4S meeting room, Hendra, a representative of an organization called PTDesa Bali (Balinese Village, Ltd., hereafter PTDB), presented a slick PowerPointdisplay outlining the aims of PTDB and what it had to offer KSP. Despite its formas a limited liability company, the avowed aims of PTDB were those more com-monly embodied in development NGOs, namely, to assist in improving villagelivelihoods and standards of living, especially through agricultural develop-ment. Its means, however, were not those of charity or aid, but of a businesspartnership in which PTDB would provide capital and expertise to assist the lo-cal community to improve its productivity and profitability and eventually tobecome an independent business, over a period of ten years.37

PTDB’s analysis of the problems facing farmers was insightful and compre-hensive and their proposed solution likewise addressed every aspect of thesituation in an integrated way. The core of their proposal was for farmers tohand over most of their crop for marketing by PTDB in exchange for a guaran-teed monthly income and other benefits. The farmers would retain one-sixth oftheir crop for themselves. PTDB would provide the initial capital for seed andother production costs, and it would invest development funds in technical im-provements to boost productivity and quality.

Farmers’ incomes were to be calculated according to the area of land ownedor worked by the farmer involved. Returns would be used to pay off the initialinvestment and then to support efforts to boost productivity, to provide insur-ance against crop failures, and to underwrite benefits such as health andretirement. Eventually earnings would be used to build up a stock of capital forthe transition to an independent business, to be known as PT Subak WangayaBetan (PTSWB).

PTDB’s approach was two-pronged, addressing both the input and outputsides of the equation. It believed that production could be increased to nine ormore tons per hectare by use of the latest seed, planting, and post-harvest tech-nologies while retaining the existing benefits of organic production. PTDB alsorecommended expanding the existing organic production to a neighboringsubak to achieve economies of scale. But PTDB’s main thrust was on the market-ing side: they aimed to increase income by bypassing the middlemen and selling


37. Hendra is a pseudonym, as are the names of most other members of PTDB, but PTDB (and itsoffshoot companies) are not, because they are publicly listed company whose activities havealso been reported in the public media.


high-quality organic rice in premium markets, initially local ones, but ultimatelynationally and internationally as well. PTDB’s financial projections showed in-creases in profitability sufficient to pay for all the proposed benefits on top ofrunning and overhead costs.

PTDB was a registered company with three directors, Hendra, Jro GedeKarang Tangkid Suarshana, and Pak Karto. Hendra is an Indonesian who spentmost of his working life in the IT industry in the Netherlands, much of it at amanagement level. Returning to Bali to live and work, he became involved withsustainable agriculture and has developed a good working knowledge of the is-sues farmers face as well as how the rice market functions. He was the workingpartner, the front man, and to some extent the driving force of PTDB. Jro GedeKarang is a Balinese businessman, one of the most successful of the first genera-tion of tourism entrepreneurs in Bali. He has now stepped back somewhat fromhis business interests in order to devote himself to agricultural development. Atthe time of PTDB’s first visit to KSP, Jro Gede Karang had just announced his en-try into politics, possibly even as a candidate for the governorship of Bali.38

Karto, another Javanese businessman also with connections to the Netherlands,has had IT interests in Bali at least as far back as the mid 1990s. Through theirnetworks the three directors claimed to have access to the capital needed to fi-nance the proposed developments. Arthawiguna was appointed operationsmanager of the proposed PTSWB and G.N.A. Sumaru, an academic economist,was named director of finances for the parent company and main director of thelocal company.


38. Jro Gede Karang’s presence, and the content of his speech, was an undoubted boost to theprestige of the project, but may also be read as an early step toward establishing his political le-gitimacy among farmers. This introduces yet another layer of motivation and interests into theproject, but this is another story.

(l-r): Nengah Arisa, Alit Arthawiguna, and G.N.A. Sumaru. (Courtesy: Alit Arthawiguna)


Neither Karang nor Karto appeared to need more income, least of all from aproject oriented more to long-term local development than short-term profit.According to Karang, the aim of the project was to provide farmers with accessto “the benefits of the global market, but with protection from the risks.” Hen-dra eventually become a salaried employee of PTDB. In the proposed contractswith the local companies they would spawn, PTDB proposed to take what ap-peared to be reasonable fees to cover their costs as well as a 20 percent share inthe local companies. The remaining 80 percent was to be divided among the lo-cal members as shares, based on their landholdings.

At the time there seemed little reason for concern about the motivation ofPTDB and the transparency and fairness of their proposals. However, the ideawas new and radically beyond the experience of the farmers. From the start theyall faced challenges in mutual understanding and communication. The knowl-edge, experience, and worldviews of PTDB and the farmers were worlds apartand differences in outlook and priorities soon became apparent. The farmerswere enthusiastic in principle, but they had many questions about pragmaticdetails. Many of these questions reflected the real concerns of ordinary farmers:crop failures, differentials of land ownership, utilization and productivity, andsuch technically and politically tricky issues as the inequality between ownersand sharecroppers.39

At the second meeting with PTDB, representatives from a neighboring subakparticipated. This subak, which is even larger than Wangaya Betan (having over300 hectares and more than 600 members), was one of several—inspired byWangaya Betan’s success—converting to organic production. The same issuesand differences of outlook surfaced in this and subsequent meetings.

For PTDB time was of the essence (presumably because of the investmentcosts involved) so its leaders wanted to enter into contracts before the newplanting season (August–September 2007). But as the complexity of the issuesbecame increasingly apparent, they realized that this timetable was not feasible.As they analyzed the data collected from farmers, it also became clear that thesmaller holdings, especially those worked by sharecroppers, would not pro-duce sufficient income to be economically viable. Their proposed solution wasto consolidate holdings, partly by retiring older farmers or relocating them tolighter duties in compost production. Changes of this order needed time for ne-gotiation and implementation. Thus, they developed a three-step processtoward the final ten-year contracts. By the end of August 2007, more than thirtyfarmers had taken the first step, an agreement that PTDB would meet their pro-duction costs and buy their crop at slightly above normal market price, withmild sanctions for underproduction and bonuses for excess production. Thiswas an attractive low-risk initial step for farmers prior to the deeper commit-ment that would follow.


39. Issues of tenure are, as Nitish Jha has reminded me, always important in Balinese agriculture,and are one of several missing links in this story. This calls for more detailed ethnographic re-search.


Progress and Problems

By the middle of 2008, significant progress had been made, but problems hadalso arisen (some of them predictable). All but a couple of notoriously stubbornmembers of Subak WB had begun converting to organic production. In total themembers now had 400 cattle, more than they needed at a rate of two per hect-are. The P4S was thriving, providing training to a steady stream of visitors fromas far away as West Papua. Another new development was the establishment,with government funding, of a Bali Cattle Breeding Center (Pusat PembibitanSapi Bali), which aimed to improve the quality of stock by breeding and raisingcattle to supply to other farmers. The ultimate goal was to restock Bali with itsown cattle and reintroduce them into the rice field ecosystem.40

On the commercial side, two new companies had been formed, PT Manage-ment Subak Bali (PTMSB) and PT Subak Wangaya Betan (PTSWB). The formergrew out of PT Desa Bali as the central (parent) company providing capital,management, and marketing. Its directors (komisaris) were Hendra, Karto, andhis brother Pringo, as well as Alit Arthawiguna and G.N.A. Sumaru. (Jro GedeKarang had by this time resigned.) PTSWB was the local offspring company ulti-mately to be 80 percent owned by local farmers, but at this stage all sharesremained in the hands of the parent company.

The market for organic rice had proved less strong than anticipated, as thevast majority of Indonesians place a higher value on taste and an appearance of“whiteness” rather than on subtleties of provenance, but buyers had beenfound in Surabaya and Jakarta. Orders were also coming in from Europe, butservicing these involved obtaining special export permits.41 Some eighty farm-ers, about half of them from the WB area, had contracts of various kinds withPTMSB. Negotiations were under way to bring in more farmers because of theneed for a larger quantity of rice to ensure a reliable supply and sufficient variet-ies to meet buyers’ demands and to achieve economies of scale. This progresswas frustratingly slow for PTMSB, but despite this and ongoing problems ofcommunication, the parent company had pushed ahead boldly with a majorcapital investment in a new rice mill.

The new mill was not simply an improved version of the local mills that dotthe landscape all over Bali, but a large modern building housing a modernstate-of-the-art rice milling system, with machinery imported from China. Themill deals with the entire process from cleaning the raw harvested rice to thepacking of selected premium grain into pre-labeled packages of various sizes.Its power requirements far exceed the entire capacity of the local grid supply sothe mill has its own diesel-powered generator. By this stage the company had in-


40. Bali cattle are a small subspecies distinctive to Bali. They were traditionally used for ploughingand fertilizing rice fields, but since the Green Revolution, they have (for a number of reasons)progressively disappeared from the agricultural landscape and by the early twenty-first cen-tury, appeared destined to die out.

41. Export of rice is illegal in Indonesia, reflecting the priority of national self-sufficiency, but thereis now provision for exceptions in the case of special premium products.


vested a total of Rp 7.5 milyar, mostly in the factory.42 This large investment,which was way beyond anything dreamt of in Wangaya Betan, betokened a com-pany vision and agenda larger than one village.

PTMSB was in fact buying rice from farmers elsewhere in Bali in order tomeet demand from their buyers, especially for ciherang, a new and popular va-riety.43 The first priority for the factory was to increase turnover from the presenttwo to three tons/day to at least five tons/day. For this quantity a cropping area offifty to eighty hectares was needed. The break-even point, in terms of opera-tional costs alone, would require about ten tons/day; the maximum capacity ofthe plant is between forty to sixty tons/day (requiring 500 to 800 hectares). Thislevel of investment meant at least a fourfold increase in input of harvested grainin order to break even.

At first local people were simply bemused by the scale of the factory, but astime went on they became uneasy about new developments such as the com-pany bringing in skilled outside labor to operate the mill. Because the mill ishighly automated, the numbers were small, but the issue for locals was one oflocal control and development. Farmers were also unhappy about aspects oftheir contractual arrangements with the company, including a 10 percent man-agement “fee” deducted from the payments they received for their crops. Theirchief concern, however, seemed to be as much about matters of principle andtheir lack of voice in the process as about the money itself.

On 26 July 2008 a meeting was convened to address these concerns, whichhad by this time become apparent to management. About twenty-five farmersattended. Aided by a formidable PowerPoint display of Excel spreadsheets, Hen-dra tried to clarify and explain what they were doing by reference to its financialbasis. The formulae were complex and difficult for the farmers to understand.As the meeting progressed the deeper underlying dissatisfactions surfaced.These were expressed most clearly by farmers who had sold their crop to thecompany but now wanted part of it back for household food or ritual purposesand found that their only option was to buy it at market prices. While this wasclearly stipulated in their contracts, for the farmers the breach was not of a con-tract but of what they understood to be a mutual moral commitment to eachother’s welfare. This illustrated a gulf between the two economic understand-ings that the parties brought to their relationship: one, embedded in a widercapitalist economy, the other, in a local/moral economy. Hendra’s brave at-tempts to explain the financial and moral bases of the contracts came to little inthe face of this misunderstanding. The PTMSB directors present were shockedand upset as they began to grasp the loss of trust that had occurred and vowedto make amends.

This misunderstanding was mirrored within the management of the com-pany itself. Arthawiguna’s relationship with WB, which long predated the


42. Approximately US$750,000.43. Ciherang, which was developed from the previously standard IR64 and released onto the mar-

ket in 2000, is widely preferred because of its superior taste. It has since become the newstandard variety in much of Bali.


involvement of PTSMB, was based on a gradual building of the economic base offarmers by improvements in productivity and sustainability, underpinned byshared understandings of the culture and moral economy of rice production.He felt that the company did not understand these matters, let alone know howto communicate with farmers, and that it was moving too fast, driven by purelyfinancial considerations. This in turn was placing strains on Arthawiguna’s ownrelationship with the community, on which the whole project had been basedfrom the start. He resigned from the company early in 2008.

By this stage it was clear that the differences of understanding, evident in theinitial meetings a year earlier, were indeed becoming serious obstacles and alsothat the company was making little progress in adjusting its approach to dealwith them. Whatever their original motivations may have been (e.g., assisting lo-cal development), the financial imperatives built into the company model wereclearly driving the project and making it harder for company officials to hear letalone accommodate the farmers’ point of view. The stage seemed set for furtherproblems unless a way of bridging this gap could be found.

Unfortunately a way was not found and the project unraveled over the fol-lowing months. With Arthawiguna gone, Hendra found himself in much thesame situation as Arthawiguna had been in: advocating for the farmers’ con-cerns against the increasingly inflexible commercial priorities of his fellowdirectors. Presumably because of the mounting losses—due largely to the


The two projects described and analyzed in this article provide evidence of “the technicaland economic viability of organic rice production in Bali and, by extension, in otherwet-rice environments in monsoon Asia.” (Credit: author)


underutilized mill—the directors bankrolling the project decided that “helpingthe farmers” (their aim at the start) was no longer affordable: they needed alarger financial return. In effect this meant no more compromises.

Hendra left in early 2009 and a few months later the company pulled out ofWangaya Betan altogether. The new factory was abandoned. The company wasplanning to dismantle the mill and move it to a location that promised a betterreturn, but there was also talk among farmers that the mill belonged to the com-munity and they might prevent it from being removed.44

When I next met Hendra a few months later he was still licking his woundsand busy rebuilding his own business: being a “friendly tengkulak” to what re-mained of the network of farmers with whom he had so laboriously built uprelationships and trying to get them a fair price for their organic rice. Arthawi-guna was still working with the WB farmers to improve their productionprojects. Most farmers had more manure than they could use and Nengah haddeveloped yet another business marketing this new surplus. He had renovatedand upgraded his own mill and was now able to process larger quantities into ahigher quality product more suitable for premium markets.

Despite the demise of the company and the burnt fingers all round, the ideaof marketing seems to have caught on and in 2009 KSP entered a new govern-ment-supported program designed to help local farmers’ groups becomemarketing bodies (Lembaga Distribusi Pangan Masyarakat Indonesia, orLDPMI). The government advances capital for the group to buy farmers’ pro-duce (at prices negotiated in open meetings). In Wangaya Betan the processgoes through Nengah, who mills and markets rice supplied by other farmers.

The P4P continues as a separate entity, concerned with human resource de-velopment, training, and outreach all over Indonesia. KSP is seeking funding fora Village Energy Self-Sufficiency (Desa Mandiri Energi) project based on biogas(methane), which they are producing from the wet slurry from their central cat-tle stalls. They now talk of their future development in terms of a new slogan: F4(food, feed, fertilizer, and fuel).

What began as a waste management project became a composting one, an or-ganic rice production one (the focus of this essay), an educational one, amarketing one, and in the end, perhaps, a local energy one. It has been arguedthat “the real failing of the Green Revolution was ideological” (rather than tech-nical)—the “immorality of its ecology.”45 While the farmers understand theirproblems primarily in economic terms, the more reflective among them seethem also in moral terms. Both the successes and the failures of this project maylikewise be seen in terms of the morality and otherwise of relationships with in-terested outsiders. So, what we may be seeing in Bali is the beginning of there-embedment of rice production in its local moral/ecological context.


44. My knowledge of these events comes largely from conversations with my friends Alit and Hen-dra. I am grateful to them both for their open and honest sharing of information as well as theirown perceptions and feelings. I record also my respect for the (typically Indonesian) dignityand resigned good humor with which they accepted unhappy outcomes and declined to layblame for the problems.

45. Dove and Kammen 1997, 96.


Conclusions

The two main issues that have emerged from this updated overview of rice agri-culture in Bali are the unanticipated breakthroughs in organic production andthe marketing challenges that farmers have to confront.46

We have examined two projects (there are more no doubt) of successful con-version to the organic production of rice. Significantly, and unlike earlierattempts, both have been initiated and managed primarily by groups of localfarmers rather than by government or foreign aid/development agencies. Inboth cases individuals of exceptional skill and commitment played key roles inthe projects. Both are Balinese and are to varying degrees insiders in the com-munities involved. Other noteworthy features are these:

• Both projects began by analyzing the fundamental problem of eco-nomic sustainability resulting from static prices for produce and risingcosts and by linking the parallel technical and economic dimensions ofthis equation.• Both projects identified the techno-economic advantages of substitut-ing locally produced compost for petrochemical fertilizers and have alsovirtually eliminated petrochemical pesticide use with successful resultsand beneficial side effects.• In addition to lowering production costs, both projects produced sur-prising and apparently sustainable increases in productivity.

These two projects provide evidence of the technical and economic viability oforganic rice production in Bali and, by extension, in other wet-rice environ-ments in monsoon Asia.

In addition to these projects, there are other more modest examples of indi-viduals and groups of farmers moving independently toward organicproduction, in many cases by way of SRI. These efforts all signal a weakening ofonce-unquestioned conventional practices and a growing awareness of andwillingness to experiment with alternatives. The fact that some of these otherprojects are in urban, touristed, and affluent areas, where farmers work lessthan full time, indicates a broader-based movement that could take root in a va-riety of social and economic environments.

Progress on the marketing side has clearly been slower and more difficultthan on the production side. This remains a significant challenge. The boutiquemarket in Bali for premium and organic rice is strong and supports high prices,but it is small and would be unlikely to absorb a large increase in organic pro-duction in the foreseeable future. Selling organic produce on the ordinary localmarket is possible, as some producers have shown, but such sales are unlikelyto bring higher prices, at least in the short term. This is the problem PTDB wasaddressing by seeking out premium markets farther a field and by replacing themiddlemen.


46. Some of the conclusions that can be drawn from this story have been discussed elsewhere; oth-ers will be described and analyzed in future publications. One, Arthawiguna and MacRae,2010, concerns the role of the subak in this process. The other, MacRae forthcoming, concernsthe factors that enable successful development projects.


There was no problem with the logic of PTDB’s plans and their aims wereworthy, but their dramatic and costly (for the directors if not for the farmers)failure points to the inherent difficulties in achieving these aims in practice and,more importantly, the failure of PTDB to engage with the farmers in a way thatbuilt the mutual understanding and trust necessary for success. The contrast be-tween this failure and the equally clear success of the production project,suggests that a model of key relationships and communication more like thatwhich enabled the production project is likely to be a more productive ap-proach. The new government-sponsored but locally controlled marketinginitiative is a promising step in this direction.

Further Questions

While the obvious conclusions to be drawn from this story concern organicproduction and marketing, it also reveals the complexity and interrelated-ness of what might be called a “rice production and marketing complex.” Thiscomplex involves multiple elements and steps, from management of primaryecological resources, through seed and fertilizer procurement to harvesting,processing, and marketing of final products. It also engages local economieswith regional and global supply chains and market forces. Although these are ina sense separate elements, often performed by different parties, they are inte-grally related and not easily separated, as PTMSB found to its cost. While thefocus of this essay has been on the fertilizing, production, and marketing stages,it has also revealed significant gaps in understanding of the interrelatedness ofthis complex.

PTDB’s unsuccessful foray into the harvest, milling, and marketing end of theprocess shows, apart from the key failure to engage successfully with produc-ers, how complex and little understood the rice market in Bali (and indeedIndonesia) is, even by its participants. Top-down macro-studies by economistsare plentiful, but local-level studies—especially ones that reflect the points ofview of the small players (farmers, harvesters, millers, buyers, and sellers) arerare.47

Another area of change, signaled in PTDB’s unrealized plans for increasedproductivity, is the development of new technologies for raising yields even fur-ther. Looming largest among these is the use of hybrid seed and plantingsystems, developed and widely used in China as well as in Vietnam, India, theUnited States, and to a lesser extent the Philippines. Marketing of these systems


47. Such studies were relatively common until the 1980s (for a recent review, see White 2000), butsince then they have been all but abandoned. Among the rare exceptions are Ellis 1993 andBourgeois and Gouyon 2001, but even these are based on research a decade or more ago inparts of the country where economic conditions were, even then, rather different from Bali.The work of Stefan and Rachel Lorenzen (2008) is one exception that is both recent and re-lated to Bali.

48. “RI–China Kerjasama Benih Padi Hibrida,” Antara News, 6 December 2007; Sumarno 2006;Virmani et al., n.d.; Simatupang and Timmer 2008, 67. It is perhaps significant that the coun-tries most involved in hybrid varieties are also the largest exporters of rice.

49. See Mathews and Wassman 2003.50. A similar point has also been made recently by Hart and Peluso 2005, 182.


has begun in Indonesia, and has official government interest, but to date theyhave attracted little interest among farmers, certainly in Bali. While this newtechnology is being promoted by the International Rice Research Institute andgovernments, as well as by commercial interests, its effects on local farmingpractices and economics are not yet well understood.48

Finally, global concerns, policies, and emerging practices to do with climatechange will inevitably begin to affect rice cultivation in the years to come. Onone hand, wet-rice fields are a well-known source of the powerful greenhousegas methane and, on the other, it is also well-known that relatively smallchanges in temperature and rainfall can have significant effects on crop produc-tivity and diseases. The new methane-based energy project at Wangaya Betanbegins to address one side of this issue, but it is reasonable to anticipate an in-crease in the influence of these factors.49

Taken together these emerging issues reinforce the need for more systematiccommitment to understanding the dynamics of the entire rice production com-plex. While this system is a global one, and analysis at this level is essential, theevidence presented here shows that useful lessons can be learnt in relativelysmall, peripheral, and atypical corners of the rice world such as Bali. It also re-minds us once again, given the preponderance of top-down, quantitative,macroeconomic studies, that local-level ethnographic studies are much neededin order to reflect the often-overlooked perspectives of farmers in the fields andin the communities in which they live.50

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: This article is based on regular research in Bali since 1993, with aspecific focus on agriculture since 2003. Research was facilitated initially by the Indone-sian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) and Udayana University and has been assisted financiallyby Auckland and Massey Universities. I am grateful to all the friends and colleagues men-tioned here (especially Alit Arthawiguna), to countless anonymous farmers, to StephanLorenzen for insightful feedback on a draft of this article, and to CAS editor Tom Fentonfor editorial rigor beyond the call of duty.

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